My Fair Princess

June 20, 2016
Kelly’s Improper Princesses Regency series opens gallantly with well-thought-out characters, madcap adventures, and London’s cunning, cagey elite. Gillian Dryden’s royal bloodline can’t completely make up for her illegitimate birth and wild upbringing in Sicily. She becomes a target of Sicilian bandits and is brought back to England to be safely schooled in refinement and married off. Charles, Duke of Leverton, who’s known as Perfect Penley, grudgingly agrees to be her social tutor. After Gillian assaults a boorish earl and shoots a robber, she is further tarnished socially. Gillian’s continued recklessness and lack of decorum challenge Charles, and she begins to chip away at his controlled life. Gillian’s antics imbue her story with energy and some intrigue, but the most affecting part of Kelly’s tale is Charles’s development as he falls in love with Gillian and breaks free of complacency and propriety. This is a fun ride with a colorful, adventurous heroine and a happily disconcerted, formerly perfect hero. Agent: Evan Marshall, Evan Marshall Agency.

Narrator Beverley A. Crick seamlessly shifts between the many characters in the first book in the Improper Princess series. Gillian Dryden, the irrepressible bandit-fighting heroine, was raised in the Sicilian countryside after her family was exiled following a torrid scandal. Now she's reluctantly forced back to England, where the hopelessly proper and helplessly handsome Duke of Leverton is charged with finding her a suitable husband and restoring the family name. Crick is a master at conveying the various English voices in this romantic romp through the English countryside. Although the accent of Italian-bred Gillian sounds more Eastern European than Mediterranean, listeners will relish the clever banter between this smart protagonist and her ever-so-proper guardian. D.S. � AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine